[Kirby64]

Not just motherboards. Cases, PC accessories (fans, etc), consumer SSDs, and more. Cases are especially hard hit, apparently, as they're already quite a low margin business.

Personally, I see little reason to upgrade from my AM4 platform. It's never been easier to hold on to aging hardware with the advent of DLSS stretching older cards further, diminishing returns on the newer gen GPUs, and the 'realism' of video games plateauing.

[Liftyee]

I should have upgraded my GTX 1060 6GB last year.

Last year I said I should have upgraded my 1060 last year.

I bought it second hand 7 years ago and it is still the same price.

I don't do much gaming, and it runs Immich / etc light inference just fine. One thing I don't regret is getting 32GB of DDR4 when I built the system around the time of the GPU upgrade.

[dangus]

Sometimes you just have to accept the current pricing and buy what you need to buy (assuming you need to buy anything at all).

7 years ago it was the same price, but then again, the last 7 years have involved accelerated inflation. So, the same price is actually a lower price.

If you're looking for a card in the sane $300 area, the Intel ARC B580 (12GB) or the RX 9060XT (8GB) are a reasonable value. If you want 12GB+ from Nvidia or AMD the used market in previous generations is a good place to look: maybe something like a RTX 3060Ti (12GB) or RX6800XT (16GB).

I personally don't think the GPU market is incredibly miserable. Maybe I am just used to the pain or something? Nvidia has a bit of a tax where but something like the RX 9070XT is basically the 3rd fastest gaming GPU money can buy and it's around $700. (I'm not sure why the 5070ti costs $200 more even given Nvidia's software advantages. It performs almost identically it just doesn't make purchase sense)

[saysjonathan]

3060ti only has 8GB, 3080ti has 12GB. That’ll make a difference for prices/comparison.

[dangus]

I think I made a mistake there, I meant to recommend the 3060 12GB version. I'm realizing now that the Ti didn't get the 12GB.

If you're getting 8GB then I'd say there's not much reason to go back to previous generations.

[misnome]

I’m in almost exactly the same boat.

2017 GTX 1070 and 32GB ram. I don’t run games 4K and still haven’t had any problems running reasonably pretty recent stuff.

[Helmut10001]

I invested quite a bit in enterprises level homelab equipment 2020 to 2025 (about 10k). Happy I made it before the big bang. Eg. my SAS he8 drives will last at least till 2035. But what then? I want my children to be free, too.

[PowerElectronix]

When investors stop to ponder if they are ever going to see any return on their superhot AI investments, you'll have all the cheap hardware you could ever want.

[groby_b]

You cannot be fully free if you're attached to physical goods.

It may sound like pseudo-Buddhist claptrap, but it's also true. Or, I suppose, Fight Club claptrap. It's still true.

The choice is "do you want to participate in society, its benefits and drawbacks". You can't have only one side of that.

[lioeters]

The first rule of Buddhist Fight Club is that attachment causes suffering.

[andrekandre]

  > attachment causes suffering

it also makes the economy go round (unfortunately)

[danparsonson]

You're not supposed to talk about it!

[MegaDeKay]

What's wild is with all this craziness going on, it is sounding like AMD is bringing back the 5800X3D for another kick at the can. AM4 has got to be one of the greatest platforms to ever exist.

[jolmg]

> and the 'realism' of video games plateauing.

I used to think the plateau was here when the Xbox 360 and PS3 came out.

[bigstrat2003]

I still think it pretty much was the last major generational upgrade in graphics. An early PS3 game looked night and day better than a late PS2 game. Meanwhile, an early PS4 game looked only marginally better than a late PS3 game, and most PS5 games don't look noticeably better than a PS4 game.

I don't mind that graphics have plateaued, because they aren't the important bit. If anything, I would rather that devs stop trying to chase graphics and make more games with shorter dev cycles.

[Kirby64]

> Meanwhile, an early PS4 game looked only marginally better than a late PS3 game, and most PS5 games don't look noticeably better than a PS4 game.

Partially this is because there was usually an overlap in sales for early PS4 and late PS3, etc. if you have to support both console generations, it won’t truly be able to take advantage of the newer gen stuff.

[Tanoc]

Texture resolution and shadow resolution do a lot to make a game look better. The big difference between the PlayStation 2 and 3 was the massive jump in texture resolution, shadow resolution and model polygon count. Play Gran Turismo 5 and go look at one of the cars imported from Gran Turismo 4 for a good example. However the PlayStation 2 was capable of some very high polygon count models, as evidenced by Lulu's cutscene model from Final Fantasy X that rivals most PlayStation 3 player models in detail. Those resolution upgrades, the number of objects and not just polygons displayable on screen, and the increase in distance required for low-poly LOD models all made that giant leap possible and very visible. Since then it's mostly been adding camera effects such as depth of field and ambient occlusion that are much less noticeable. Though for those with keen eyes, only in the current generation are there textures without noticeable anti-aliasing effects which came as a result of being able to split the UVs thanks to a higher resolution making small UV faces possible.

[hamdingers]

Since we're 10 years on at this point, I feel pretty confident saying the plateau to my eyes landed somewhere between the PS4 in 2013 and Pascal (GeForce 10-series) in 2016.

I've kept playing games and upgrading my GPU every other generation, and they're still fully utilized, but I can't really see where the additional compute and money is going. My biggest visual upgrade during that time was actually going from LED to HDR OLED which is something that requires virtually no additional processing power.

[Simulacra]

Agreed. I build a system every ten years and I've got 6 years to go. AM4 works great, and I've managed to hoard enough ram and drives to hopefully cover any concerns for the next 4 years. Things work, they are stable, and I feel super lucky for that.